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travel, art and photography

Perhaps it was found underneath a pile of dusty, spiderweb covered quilts, or shoved behind a pile of outdated encyclopedias. A simple and small thing to misplace and leave behind…. or maybe something purposely hidden away, to never think of again. Delicate, ornately covered fingers uncovering and dusted off to peek a look inside. Perhaps stubby young hands grabbed without notice, shoved in a pocket for a later look. And the question itches at the mind, does it itself, tell your future…?

Could be it was a gift, from some half-stranger right around the time the sun was setting on the third day in the last week of that 11th month. Or a whimsical purchase from a used trinkets store, it glinted in the reflected sunlight of old mirrors and the want tugged at some memory long buried. Something slightly borrowed from a beloved aunt or taken from a distant and never-seen relative. Were you asked to take a glimpse at the events to come and fold it up, hide it inside, to forget only to remember on another distant day?

It could have been as easy as being handed a small card from inside, any card, pick one, and tell me a story. Amid breathing in cold and wild blue winter air or burning the smell of a summer ending in willing lungs while the sky slowly lit up with stars. Your future is only a single option from a list of many to be told, easily and fairly exchanged for a thrill at the unknown.

Tell Your Future,

~m

Part of a new series i’m working on, a way to stretch out those creative writing tendrils a bit. For anyone curious, I listed to the Carnivàle soundtrack on repeat while I came up with the idea for the tin and the words following. Creepy and lovely, with just a hint of disturbing. Highly recommended songs : Black Blizzard, Justin Calls Iris, Rita Sue and Jonesy, Babylon and of course the Main Title Theme.

Thats a hell of a title huh?
Where do I even begin….. well,lets start with, I quit my job.

I’ve never really talked about it in depth here, apart from mentioning that it required me to buy fancy trousers and gave me ample time to listen to lectures and podcasts while I worked. To boil it down to the essentials, it’s a pharmacy office job where I sit at my overly-huge desk, boot up about 10 different programs and spread them out on my two screens to review and type up prescriptions for dialysis patients on my ergonomically correct keyboard thats about 2 sizes larger than a regular keyboard and took my clumsy fingers weeks to get used to. It’s what i’d call a cushy job, with a nice paycheck and lovely hour lunches that I could easily get used to….if it wasn’t for the fact that my brain started shriveling the second I came out of training and had to get through a day by myself.

I’d never had an office job before and I thought…well, I thought it would be great honestly. Compared to the utterly stressful places i’d worked at before, running from one volatile situation to the next, juggling 4 different tasks while also having a phone stuck to my head with a pissed off patient on the other end of the line…I don’t know, it seemed ideal. And it was,it definitely was.

For a while, until it wasn’t.

Untill my insomnia started getting worse and worse and I was running on a collective 4 hours of sleep for days on end, till I realized that I had pretty much alienated all my friends and family and even my artistic pursuits had dried up like dead animal husks in the very harsh desert that my mind was turning into. Untill I realized that I was pretty much neck deep in depression and it was only going to get worse from here on. It took me a good 4 months to realize (and admit to myself) that this isn’t the kind of job I can do. Four months to realize that sitting at a desk all day with just my thoughts and podcasts for company wasn’t all that much better than what I had previously been doing. Sure, the moneys great, but if I can’t even use the art supplies the paychecks enabled me to buy, to read all the books, comics and magazines I could afford to splurge on, whats the point exactly? I’m oversimplifying the situation of course, I could probably draw up a chart and write a 10 page essay on all the factors leading me down into the pit of depression I found myself in but, hopefully, you can trust when I say, it wasn’t the place for me.

So, I handed in my resignation letter last week, and next Friday will be my last day and I don’t have any real clue what my next job’s going to be, or even where exactly i’ll be looking. I have enough money that i’ll be alright for a good bit, and an incredibly amazing and supportive boyfriend who’s made sure I don’t feel like an utter failure (because of course I feel like that half the time) and… and well, I feel better now than i’ve felt in a long time, even if I have no idea what comes next. So that has to be good, right? Maybe it sounds nuts to quit your cushy job when you don’t have an idea of what comes next and no doubt thats probably somewhat true, but I can’t really make myself feel illogical for doing it either way. After all, a mind is a terrible thing to waste.

Moving on to something completely different, with no good segue at all, the new keyboard! Ah jeez, what can I say, a person can’t have enough interests right? Seriously though, sometimes I walk into my studio/office room and I think ” fuck, my heads really a mess isn’t it?.” . The walls here are covered with postcards and snailmail from penpals, posters of Batman, coffee shop menus, fashion photos, maps of cities I haven’t been to yet… There’s a table full of art supplies in front of the window, pilled to overfill with sketchbooks, watercolors, colored pencils, ink pens, graphite pencil sets, sketches and color studies . To the right of that is a wall covered with architecture photographs, piles of magazines (art, lifestyle, architecture, designs and fashion), books and my oft neglected sewing machine. Above is a shelf full of graphic novels, art books and random nerdy nicknacks. Somewhere to the right is a big red Ikea unit that has a basket of my sewing projects, more fabric than I’ll even know what to do with, jars of buttons and ribbons galore. Underneath, more books,names like Dawkins and Sagan peeking out from underneath craft and fantasy books and just about every theres some kind of journal or notecard with stories or poems or lyrics scribbled on them.

And now, to complete the whole shebang, a keyboard. This isn’t an entirely new whim mind you, I used to play one when I was in high school and recently my hands desperately itched to touch one again, so for my birthday a couple of weeks ago the boyfriend went out and brought one home. And now i’m learning basic music theory, because of course I am. Anyways, after that it was pretty easy to say to myself “Yo, maybe you need to give up at least one of your other pursuits if you don’t want your brain to slowly start leaking out of your ears” So I’ve put aside my yearning to learn German (at least for this year) to focus instead on my rapidly declining Spanish skills. ¿Qué más puedo decir, verdad?

Man… I feel like this post is getting ridiculously long and overindulgent, so i’m just gonna say, when it comes to the last part of my title, after coming across some hilarious posts on tumblr and re-watching the new reboot movies, I decided to take a chance and start watching the original series on Netflix and oh gods. I have literally never enjoyed a series more than i’m enjoying this one. Sure, the effects can be cheesy and there’s moments where I find myself yelling at the screen for Kirk to make better command decisions (come on man!Are you the captain or what?!) that I left wonder what i’m doing with my life, but it’s very decidedly, totally my jam.

So yup. Thats where my heads at, where my life is at, and I have really nothing concrete to say about any of it. The one thing that I do know for sure is that i’m taking this next month to just get my shit together. Which will hopefully mean more posts having to do with art, photography, music and less about my mess of emotions and the continual science experiment that is my life, because really, theres only so much you can say about that. Also, i’m bringing back my art journal, since abandoning it when i’m almost done is just shy of insane, considering i’ve been working on it for over a year at this point. And, last but not at all least, I can hopefully begin to repair the friendships i’ve damaged these past 4 months. I might still be digging myself out of this expansive crater of depression but I can at least try and be a better person than i’ve been, no matter how enticing solitude can look from down here.

Life is not meant to be lived alone, and while it can certainly feel easier that way, in the long run i’d rather deal with the dramatics and heartbreak than the oppressing loneliness that comes when it’s 3am, you can’t sleep and there’s no one to call. I’d also very much like to be the person thats called at 3am, even if it’s only to have odd conversations about thought experiments, One Direction and Neil DeGrasse Tyson. So I don’t know, lets see what comes next.

~m

P.S Incase anyone was wondering, yes, that is indeed a Winter Soldier case on my iPhone. Is anyone really that surprised? Also, the shirt picture above is from the podcast 99% Invisible , which is freakin brilliant and everyone should listen to it if they have the chance. Along with Criminal, Invisibilia, Star Talk, Kakos Industries, The One You Feed and of course, Welcome to Nightvale….er, to just mention a few.

So while I might have taken a break from my art journal posts ( at least on here, i’ve been reposting a couple of sets on tumblr that have turned out surprisingly popular) i’m wouldn’t be myself unless I was filling up pages in some way or another.

I’ve had this particular journal for over 2 years now, and let me just say, apparently it has been a messy couple of years. I spent the afternoon going through the pages and I can honestly say at times I just sat there, reading lyrics or lines of poetry, thinking, “wow, thats some seriously crazy overdramatic overtures of emotion right there.” Thing is, I either get clinically cold or failingly messy when i’m emotional and…. while I might not express much emotion in public or even in private, it almost certainly gets dripped and splashed all over these pages with hearty abandon.

Reaching the end of available space in this journal makes my heart clench a little, the idea of letting go of so much emotion and starting over again in a crisp, new notebook that doesn’t know the ups or downs of my emotions intimately, it even makes me panic a little. Truth is though, when push comes to shove, at the end of the day I fall towards logic more than most any emotion, so I know i’ll bend soon and go buy a new journal, start a new story.

For the meantime though, I still have at least a dozen pages to fill, and I think it’ll be nice to fill up some thoughts in there that will maybe not toss and turn all over the lines with so much emotional upheaval. Either way though, whether i’m gutting the pages with words or neatly printing lines of concise characters, it’s seen me through some tough and trying times, interesting waves and crashing journeys and I can only really try my best to look forward to what i’ll be filling up the next one with.

There’re a lot of towns with strange, geographically inexplicable names here in Texas. There’s also innumerable churches, cathedrals, mosques and religious meeting places on pretty much every street corner, no matter what part you happen to find yourself in. I’m not religious in any of the ways that really matter, but I can respect and admire the beauty of these buildings and what they mean to those who visit. In a small town like this, less than 2 square miles total and easily missed, with a population of less than 1000, it’s easy to understand how you could find 2 churches within a stones throw of each other.

We quietly rolled down the loose gravel roads, the rocks ping ping pinging off the cars underside and disturbing the deep settled stillness and calm of the streets. There weren’t any people to be seen, bikes laid down on the grass outside of houses and birds chirping on chipping white picket fences. We pulled up to a church under construction, tools left in the grass and piled on the sidewalk. That kind of trust is hard to find in bigger cities, and while there was a slightly grumpy dog tied to the yard next door, he was more sleepy than guarding and while eventually he got a big suspicious of our idling car, it was nice to be allowed to linger without purpose in front of that church and imagine what it might look like some day.